One of Ours
Book V: "Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On"
Chapter X
After breakfast Claude reported to Headquarters and talked with one of the
staff Majors. He was told he would have to wait until tomorrow to see Colonel
James, who had been called to Paris for a general conference. He had left in his
car at four that morning, in response to a telephone message.
"There's not much to do here, by way of amusement," said the Major. "A movie
show tonight, and you can get anything you want at the estaminet,—the one on
the square, opposite the English tank, is the best. There are a couple of nice
Frenchwomen in the Red Cross barrack, up on the hill, in the old convent garden.
They try to look out for the civilian population, and we're on good terms with
them. We get their supplies through with our own, and the quartermaster has
orders to help them when they run short. You might go up and call on them. They
speak English perfectly."
Claude asked whether he could walk in on them without any kind of
introduction.
"Oh, yes, they're used to us! I'll give you a card to Mlle. Olive, though.
She's a particular friend of mine. There you are: 'Mlle. Olive de Courcy,
introducing, etc.' And, you understand," here he glanced up and looked Claude
over from head to foot, "she's a perfect lady."
Even with an introduction, Claude felt some hesitancy about presenting
himself to these ladies. Perhaps they didn't like Americans; he was always
afraid of meeting French people who didn't. It was the same way with most of the
fellows in his battalion, he had found; they were terribly afraid of being
disliked. And the moment they felt they were disliked, they hastened to behave
as badly as possible, in order to deserve it; then they didn't feel that they
had been taken in—the worst feeling a doughboy could possibly have!
Claude thought he would stroll about to look at the town a little. It had
been taken by the Germans in the autumn of 1914, after their retreat from the
Marne, and they had held it until about a year ago, when it was retaken by the
English and the Chasseurs d'Alpins. They had been able to reduce it and to drive
the Germans out, only by battering it down with artillery; not one building
remained standing.
Ruin was ugly, and it was nothing more, Claude was thinking, as he followed
the paths that ran over piles of brick and plaster. There was nothing
picturesque about this, as there was in the war pictures one saw at home. A
cyclone or a fire might have done just as good a job. The place was simply a
great dump-heap; an exaggeration of those which disgrace the outskirts of
American towns. It was the same thing over and over; mounds of burned brick and
broken stone, heaps of rusty, twisted iron, splintered beams and rafters,
stagnant pools, cellar holes full of muddy water. An American soldier had
stepped into one of those holes a few nights before, and been drowned.
This had been a rich town of eighteen thousand inhabitants; now the civilian
population was about four hundred. There were people there who had hung on all
through the years of German occupation; others who, as soon as they heard that
the enemy was driven out, came back from wherever they had found shelter. They
were living in cellars, or in little wooden barracks made from old timbers and
American goods boxes. As he walked along, Claude read familiar names and
addresses, painted on boards built into the sides of these frail shelters: "From
Emery Bird, Thayer Co. Kansas City, Mo." "Daniels and Fisher, Denver, Colo."
These inscriptions cheered him so much that he began to feel like going up and
calling on the French ladies.
The sun had come out hot after three days of rain. The stagnant pools and the
weeds that grew in the ditches gave out a rank, heavy smell. Wild flowers grew
triumphantly over the piles of rotting wood and rusty iron; cornflowers and
Queen Anne's lace and poppies; blue and white and red, as if the French colours
came up spontaneously out of the French soil, no matter what the Germans did to
it.
Claude paused before a little shanty built against a half-demolished brick
wall. A gilt cage hung in the doorway, with a canary, singing beautifully. An
old woman was working in the garden patch, picking out bits of brick and plaster
the rain had washed up, digging with her fingers around the pale carrot-tops and
neat lettuce heads. Claude approached her, touched his helmet, and asked her how
one could find the way to the Red Cross.
She wiped her hands on her apron and took him by the elbow. "Vous savez le
tank Anglais? Non? Marie, Marie!"
(He learned afterward that every one was directed to go this way or that from
a disabled British tank that had been left on the site of the old town hall.)
A little girl ran out of the barrack, and her grandmother told her to go at
once and take the American to the Red Cross. Marie put her hand in Claude's and
led him off along one of the paths that wound among the rubbish. She took him
out of the way to show him a church,—evidently one of the ruins of which they
were proudest,—where the blue sky was shining through the white arches. The
Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a little foot sticking to
her robe showed where the infant Jesus had been shot away.
"Le bebe est casse, mais il a protege sa mere," Marie explained with
satisfaction. As they went on, she told Claude that she had a soldier among the
Americans who was her friend. "Il est bon, il est gai, mon soldat," but he
sometimes drank too much alcohol, and that was a bad habit. Perhaps now, since
his comrade had stepped into a cellar hole Monday night while he was drunk, and
had been drowned, her "Sharlie" would be warned and would do better. Marie was
evidently a well brought up child. Her father, she said, had been a
schoolmaster. At the foot of the convent hill, she turned to go home. Claude
called her back and awkwardly tried to give her some money, but she thrust her
hands behind her and said resolutely, "Non, merci. Je n'ai besoin de rien," and
then ran away down the path.
As he climbed toward the top of the hill he noticed that the ground had been
cleaned up a bit. The path was clear, the bricks and hewn stones had been piled
in neat heaps, the broken hedges had been trimmed and the dead parts cut away.
Emerging at last into the garden, he stood still for wonder; even though it was
in ruins, it seemed so beautiful after the disorder of the world below.
The gravel walks were clean and shining. A wall of very old boxwoods stood
green against a row of dead Lombardy poplars. Along the shattered side of the
main building, a pear tree, trained on wires like a vine, still
flourished,—full of little red pears. Around the stone well was a shaven grass
plot, and everywhere there were little trees and shrubs, which had been too low
for the shells to hit,—or for the fire, which had seared the poplars, to catch.
The hill must have been wrapped in flames at one time, and all the tall trees
had been burned.
The barrack was built against the walls of the cloister,—three arches of
which remained, like a stone wing to the shed of planks. On a ladder stood a
one-armed young man, driving nails very skillfully with his single hand. He
seemed to be making a frame projection from the sloping roof, to support an
awning. He carried his nails in his mouth. When he wanted one, he hung his
hammer to the belt of his trousers, took a nail from between his teeth, stuck it
into the wood, and then deftly rapped it on the head. Claude watched him for a
moment, then went to the foot of the ladder and held out his two hands.
"Laissez-moi," he exclaimed.
The one aloft spat his nails out into his palm, looked down, and laughed. He
was about Claude's age, with very yellow hair and moustache and blue eyes. A
charming looking fellow.
"Willingly," he said. "This is no great affair, but I do it to amuse myself,
and it will be pleasant for the ladies." He descended and gave his hammer to the
visitor. Claude set to work on the frame, while the other went under the stone
arches and brought back a roll of canvas,—part of an old tent, by the look of
it.
"Un heritage des Boches," he explained unrolling it upon the grass. "I found
it among their filth in the cellar, and had the idea to make a pavilion for the
ladies, as our trees are destroyed." He stood up suddenly. "Perhaps you have
come to see the ladies?"
"Plus tard."
Very well, the boy said, they would get the pavilion done for a surprise for
Mlle. Olive when she returned. She was down in the town now, visiting the sick
people. He bent over his canvas again, measuring and cutting with a pair of
garden shears, moving round the green plot on his knees, and all the time
singing. Claude wished he could understand the words of his song.
While they were working together, tying the cloth up to the frame, Claude,
from his elevation, saw a tall girl coming slowly up the path by which he had
ascended. She paused at the top, by the boxwood hedge, as if she were very
tired, and stood looking at them. Presently she approached the ladder and said
in slow, careful English, "Good morning. Louis has found help, I see."
Claude came down from his perch.
"Are you Mlle. de Courcy? I am Claude Wheeler. I have a note of introduction
to you, if I can find it."
She took the card, but did not look at it. "That is not necessary. Your
uniform is enough. Why have you come?"
He looked at her in some confusion. "Well, really, I don't know! I am just in
from the front to see Colonel James, and he is in Paris, so I must wait over a
day. One of the staff suggested my coming up here—I suppose because it is so
nice!" he finished ingenuously.
"Then you are a guest from the front, and you will have lunch with Louis and
me. Madame Barre is also gone for the day. Will you see our house?" She led him
through the low door into a living room, unpainted, uncarpeted, light and airy.
There were coloured war posters on the clean board walls, brass shell cases full
of wild flowers and garden flowers, canvas camp-chairs, a shelf of books, a
table covered by a white silk shawl embroidered with big butterflies. The
sunlight on the floor, the bunches of fresh flowers, the white window curtains
stirring in the breeze, reminded Claude of something, but he could not remember
what.
"We have no guest room," said Mlle. de Courcy. "But you will come to mine,
and Louis will bring you hot water to wash."
In a wooden chamber at the end of the passage, Claude took off his coat, and
set to work to make himself as tidy as possible. Hot water and scented soap were
in themselves pleasant things. The dresser was an old goods box, stood on end
and covered with white lawn. On it there was a row of ivory toilet things, with
combs and brushes, powder and cologne, and a pile of white handkerchiefs fresh
from the iron. He felt that he ought not to look about him much, but the odor of
cleanness, and the indefinable air of personality, tempted him. In one corner, a
curtain on a rod made a clothes-closet; in another was a low iron bed, like a
soldier's, with a pale blue coverlid and white pillows. He moved carefully and
splashed discreetly. There was nothing he could have damaged or broken, not even
a rug on the plank floor, and the pitcher and hand-basin were of iron; yet he
felt as if he were imperiling something fragile.
When he came out, the table in the living room was set for three. The stout
old dame who was placing the plates paid no attention to him,—seemed, from her
expression, to scorn him and all his kind. He withdrew as far as possible out of
her path and picked up a book from the table, a volume of Heine's Reisebilder in
German.
Before lunch Mlle. de Courcy showed him the store room in the rear, where the
shelves were stocked with rows of coffee tins, condensed milk, canned vegetables
and meat, all with American trade names he knew so well; names which seemed
doubly familiar and "reliable" here, so far from home. She told him the people
in the town could not have got through the winter without these things. She had
to deal them out sparingly, where the need was greatest, but they made the
difference between life and death. Now that it was summer, the people lived by
their gardens; but old women still came to beg for a few ounces of coffee, and
mothers to get a can of milk for the babies.
Claude's face glowed with pleasure. Yes, his country had a long arm. People
forgot that; but here, he felt, was some one who did not forget. When they sat
down to lunch he learned that Mlle. de Courcy and Madame Barre had been here
almost a year now; they came soon after the town was retaken, when the old
inhabitants began to drift back. The people brought with them only what they
could carry in their arms.
"They must love their country so much, don't you think, when they endure such
poverty to come back to it?" she said. "Even the old ones do not often complain
about their dear things—their linen, and their china, and their beds. If they
have the ground, and hope, all that they can make again. This war has taught us
all how little the made things matter. Only the feeling matters."
Exactly so; hadn't he been trying to say this ever since he was born? Hadn't
he always known it, and hadn't it made life both bitter and sweet for him? What
a beautiful voice she had, this Mlle. Olive, and how nobly it dealt with the
English tongue. He would like to say something, but out of so much . . . what?
He remained silent, therefore, sat nervously breaking up the black war bread
that lay beside his plate.
He saw her looking at his hand, felt in a flash that she regarded it with
favour, and instantly put it on his knee, under the table.
"It is our trees that are worst," she went on sadly. "You have seen our poor
trees? It makes one ashamed for this beautiful part of France. Our people are
more sorry for them than to lose their cattle and horses."
Mlle. de Courcy looked over-taxed by care and responsibility, Claude thought,
as he watched her. She seemed far from strong. Slender, grey-eyed, dark-haired,
with white transparent skin and a too ardent colour in her lips and
cheeks,—like the flame of a feverish activity within. Her shoulders drooped, as
if she were always tired. She must be young, too, though there were threads of
grey in her hair,—brushed flat and knotted carelessly at the back of her head.
After the coffee, Mlle. de Courcy went to work at her desk, and Louis took
Claude to show him the garden. The clearing and trimming and planting were his
own work, and he had done it all with one arm. This autumn he would accomplish
much more, for he was stronger now, and he had the habitude of working
single-handed. He must manage to get the dead trees down; they distressed
Mademoiselle Olive. In front of the barrack stood four old locusts; the tops
were naked forks, burned coal-black, but the lower branches had put out thick
tufts of yellow-green foliage, so vigorous that the life in the trunks must
still be sound. This fall, Louis said, he meant to get some strong American boys
to help him, and they would saw off the dead limbs and trim the tops flat over
the thick boles. How much it must mean to a man to love his country like this,
Claude thought; to love its trees and flowers; to nurse it when it was sick, and
tend its hurts with one arm. Among the flowers, which had come back self-sown or
from old roots, Claude found a group of tall, straggly plants with reddish stems
and tiny white blossoms,— one of the evening primrose family, the Gaura, that
grew along the clay banks of Lovely Creek, at home. He had never thought it very
pretty, but he was pleased to find it here. He had supposed it was one of those
nameless prairie flowers that grew on the prairie and nowhere else.
When they went back to the barrack, Mlle. Olive was sitting in one of the
canvas chairs Louis had placed under the new pavilion.
"What a fine fellow he is!" Claude exclaimed, looking after him.
"Louis? Yes. He was my brother's orderly. When Emile came home on leave he
always brought Louis with him, and Louis became like one of the family. The
shell that killed my brother tore off his arm. My mother and I went to visit him
in the hospital, and he seemed ashamed to be alive, poor boy, when my brother
was dead. He put his hand over his face and began to cry, and said, 'Oh, Madame,
il etait toujours plus chic que moi!'"
Although Mlle. Olive spoke English well, Claude saw that she did so only by
keeping her mind intently upon it. The stiff sentences she uttered were foreign
to her nature; her face and eyes ran ahead of her tongue and made one wait
eagerly for what was coming. He sat down in a sagging canvas chair, absently
twisting a sprig of Gaura he had pulled.
"You have found a flower?" She looked up.
"Yes. It grows at home, on my father's farm."
She dropped the faded shirt she was darning. "Oh, tell me about your country!
I have talked to so many, but it is difficult to understand. Yes, tell me about
that!"
Nebraska—What was it? How many days from the sea, what did it look like? As
he tried to describe it, she listened with half-closed eyes. "Flat-covered with
grain-muddy rivers. I think it must be like Russia. But your father's farm;
describe that to me, minutely, and perhaps I can see the rest."
Claude took a stick and drew a square in the sand: there, to begin with, was
the house and farmyard; there was the big pasture, with Lovely Creek flowing
through it; there were the wheatfields and cornfields, the timber claim; more
wheat and corn, more pastures. There it all was, diagrammed on the yellow sand,
with shadows gliding over it from the half-charred locust trees. He would not
have believed that he could tell a stranger about it in such detail. It was
partly due to his listener, no doubt; she gave him unusual sympathy, and the
glow of an unusual mind. While she bent over his map, questioning him, a light
dew of perspiration gathered on her upper lip, and she breathed faster from her
effort to see and understand everything. He told her about his mother and his
father and Mahailey; what life was like there in summer and winter and
autumn—what it had been like in that fateful summer when the Hun was moving
always toward Paris, and on those three days when the French were standing at
the Marne; how his mother and father waited for him to bring the news at night,
and how the very cornfields seemed to hold their breath.
Mlle. Olive sank back wearily in her chair. Claude looked up and saw tears
sparkling in her brilliant eyes. "And I myself," she murmured, "did not know of
the Marne until days afterward, though my father and brother were both there! I
was far off in Brittany, and the trains did not run. That is what is wonderful,
that you are here, telling me this! We, we were taught from childhood that some
day the Germans would come; we grew up under that threat. But you were so safe,
with all your wheat and corn. Nothing could touch you, nothing!"
Claude dropped his eyes. "Yes," he muttered, blushing, "shame could. It
pretty nearly did. We are pretty late." He rose from his chair as if he were
going to fetch something . . . . But where was he to get it from? He shook his
head. "I am afraid," he said mournfully, "there is nothing I can say to make you
understand how far away it all seemed, how almost visionary. It didn't only seem
miles away, it seemed centuries away."
"But you do come,—so many, and from so far! It is the last miracle of this
war. I was in Paris on the fourth day of July, when your Marines, just from
Belleau Wood, marched for your national fete, and I said to myself as they came
on, 'That is a new man!' Such heads they had, so fine there, behind the ears.
Such discipline and purpose. Our people laughed and called to them and threw
them flowers, but they never turned to look . . . eyes straight before. They
passed like men of destiny." She threw out her hands with a swift movement and
dropped them in her lap. The emotion of that day came back in her face. As
Claude looked at her burning cheeks, her burning eyes, he understood that the
strain of this war had given her a perception that was almost like a gift of
prophecy.
A woman came up the hill carrying a baby. Mlle. de Courcy went to meet her
and took her into the house. Clause sat down again, almost lost to himself in
the feeling of being completely understood, of being no longer a stranger. In
the far distance the big guns were booming at intervals. Down in the garden
Louis was singing. Again he wished he knew the words of Louis' songs. The airs
were rather melancholy, but they were sung very cheerfully. There was something
open and warm about the boy's voice, as there was about his face-something
blond, too. It was distinctly a bland voice, like summer wheatfields, ripe and
waving. Claude sat alone for half an hour or more, tasting a new kind of
happiness, a new kind of sadness. Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things
in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and
losing; that was life, he saw.
When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the creeping
sunlight. "I didn't know there were any French girls like you," he said simply,
as she sat down.
She smiled. "I do not think there are any French girls left. There are
children and women. I was twenty-one when the war came, and I had never been
anywhere without my mother or my brother or sister. Within a year I went all
over France alone; with soldiers, with Senegalese, with anybody. Everything is
different with us." She lived at Versailles, she told him, where her father had
been an instructor in the Military School. He had died since the beginning of
the war. Her grandfather was killed in the war of 1870. Hers was a family of
soldiers, but not one of the men would be left to see the day of victory.
She looked so tired that Clause knew he had no right to stay. Long shadows
were falling in the garden. It was hard to leave; but an hour more or less
wouldn't matter. Two people could hardly give each other more if they were
together for years, he thought.
"Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get through this
war?" he asked as he rose.
He wrote it down in his notebook.
"I shall look for you," she said, giving him her hand.
There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the edge of the
hill, just before he plunged down the path, he stopped and glanced back at the
garden lying flattened in the sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and
marigolds, the glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop
which he would never find again.
The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front. They had
been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their route by following the
big road to the military cemetery, and then turning to the left. It was not
advisable to go the latter half of the way before nightfall, so they took their
time through the belt of straggling crops and hayfields.
When they struck the road they came upon a big Highlander sitting in the end
of an empty supply wagon, smoking a pipe and rubbing the dried mud out of his
kilts. The horses were munching in their nose-bags, and the driver had
disappeared. The Americans hadn't happened to meet with any Highlanders before,
and were curious. This one must be a good fighter, they thought; a brawny giant
with a bulldog jaw, and a face as red and knobby as his knees. More because he
admired the looks of the man than because he needed information, Hicks went up
and asked him if he had noticed a military cemetery on the road back. The Kilt
nodded.
"About how far back would you say it was?"
"I wouldn't say at all. I take no account of their kilometers," he replied
dryly, rubbing away at his skirt as if he had it in a washtub.
"Well, about how long will it take us to walk it?"
"That I couldn't say. A Scotsman would do it in an hour."
"I guess a Yankee can do it as quick as a Scotchman, can't be?" Hicks asked
jovially.
"That I couldn't say. You've been four years gettin' this far, I know verra
well."
Hicks blinked as if he had been hit. "Oh, if that's the way you talk—"'
"That's the way I do," said the other sourly.
Claude put out a warning hand. "Come on, Hicks. You'll get nothing by it."
They went up the road very much disconcerted. Hicks kept thinking of things he
might have said. When he was angry, the Sergeant's forehead puffed up and became
dark red, like a young baby's. "What did you call me off for?" he sputtered.
"I don't see where you'd have come out in an argument, and you certainly
couldn't have licked him."
They turned aside at the cemetery to wait until the sun went down. It was
unfenced, unsodded, and a wagon trail ran through the middle, bisecting the
square. On one side were the French graves, with white crosses; on the other
side the German graves, with black crosses. Poppies and cornflower ran over
them. The Americans strolled about, reading the names. Here and there the
soldier's photograph was nailed upon his cross, left by some comrade to
perpetuate his memory a little longer.
The birds, that always came to life at dusk and dawn, began to sing, flying
home from somewhere. Claude and Hicks sat down between the mounds and began to
smoke while the sun dropped. Lines of dead trees marked the red west. This was a
dreary stretch of country, even to boys brought up on the flat prairie. They
smoked in silence, meditating and waiting for night. On a cross at their feet
the inscription read merely: Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France.
A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who fell in this
war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young. They died and took
their secret with them,—what they were and what they might have been. The name
that stood was La France. How much that name had come to mean to him, since he
first saw a shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the Anchises.
It was a pleasant name to say over in one's mind, where one could make it as
passionately nasal as one pleased and never blush.
Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections. Now he broke the silence.
"Somehow, Lieutenant, 'mort' seems deader than 'dead.' It has a coffinish sound.
And over there they're all 'tod,' and it's all the same damned silly thing. Look
at them set out here, black and white, like a checkerboard. The next question
is, who put 'em here, and what's the good of it?"
"Search me," the other murmured absently.
Hicks rolled another cigarette and sat smoking it, his plump face wrinkled
with the gravity and labour of his cerebration. "Well," he brought out at last,
"we'd better hike. This afterglow will hang on for an hour,—always does, over
here."
"I suppose we had." They rose to go. The white crosses were now violet, and
the black ones had altogether melted in the shadow. Behind the dead trees in the
west, a long smear of red still burned. To the north, the guns were tuning up
with a deep thunder. "Somebody's getting peppered up there. Do owls always hoot
in graveyards?"
"Just what I was wondering, Lieutenant. It's a peaceful spot, otherwise.
Good-night, boys," said Hicks kindly, as they left the graves behind them.
They were soon finding their way among shell holes, and jumping trench-tops
in the dark,-beginning to feel cheerful at getting back to their chums and their
own little group. Hicks broke out and told Claude how he and Dell Able meant to
go into business together when they got home; were going to open a garage and
automobile-repair shop. Under their talk, in the minds of both, that lonely spot
lingered, and the legend: Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France.